Malawi

Running until 5 December, the Big Give campaign run by UK-based charity International Health Partners is once again doubling the value of donations, this year to support its child oncology programs in Malawi and Cameroon.

A new project devised by Pfizer and the Wellcome Trust aims to tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in four sub-Saharan African countries by using real world data to track resistance patterns and allow patients to be treated more successfully. Wellcome’s Gemma Buckland-Merrett explains how the project will work and how it could help other industry partners and governments to generate valuable data in the fight against AMR.

The first ever malaria vaccine is being launched in three African countries in an effort to gather more evidence about how it should be used in real life settings.

Dr. Kathy Rouan, a veteran member of GlaxoSmithKline plc's management team and current senior vice president and head of R&D for its dermatology business unit Stiefel, has experienced the big pharma's growth through two major mergers and various changes in management, environment and mission.

Dr June Raine is the first ever chair of the European Medicines Agency's Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee (PRAC), which oversees the risk management of your medicines. Dr Raine is also director of vigilance and risk management at MHRA, the UK regulator, as well as a member of the World Health Organization Advisory Committee on the Safety of Medicinal Products. She talked to Scrip about her passion for public health, preventing drug crises, and dancing to ABBA.

In a move that may boost to the pharma industry's reputation in poor countries, the international industry association has backed UK government calls to extend the deadline within which these countries must comply with the intellectual property rules in the World Trade Organization's TRIPS agreement. It is not yet clear what the new deadline will be.

Malawi has reasserted its efforts to tackle HIV/AIDS by becoming the first country to sign a Partnership Framework (PF) agreement with the US.